Short first-person reflection by Mark Evans DM on his entrepreneurial origins: growing up in a small, blue-collar Ohio town, motivated by family money struggles, and starting businesses early. At 18 he bought an existing seamless-gutter company with owner financing and immediately regained customers due to the prior owner's reputation and pent-up demand.
Let's go back, let's go back and meet younger Mark a little bit. 1996, small town, Ohio. Hour east of Columbus, Ohio. Grew up, like you said, in trailer court till I was 10. Moved in the house my parents live in. Still today, just a very small town, 650 people. Good, hard working people, you know, just they, they just work, you know, blue collar, blue collar. And it is what it is. So. But I always wanted more, you know, and I always watched my mom and dad, you know, fight about money, not having it. So I'm like, you know, we're all entrepreneurs. How do you solve problems? Money, you know, we're problem solvers. So if we can solve problems, big enough problems we get, we can solve other problems and you know, with the family. So I just always wanted to make money. I felt like I was kind of born an entrepreneur. I was always entrepreneurial, maybe just by default because, you know, we needed money. So I started doing that. 18 years old, two days after high school, I bought a seamless gutter company. $1,000 down, $287 a month for five years. The guy got a bad car wreck, so I couldn't really do that. But one thing I learned is, you know, you can buy companies, owner financing, creative financing. And then secondly is if it's an existing business, which was in business 16 years before I bought it, literally back, this is old days, you had to plug in the phone, call the phone company, get them out to your house and set up the separate lines. But literally as soon as we plugged in, the phone's ringing off the hook. Right. He already had a brand reputation. He didn't do work for the last three months. So he had a lot of pent up demand. And so day one, I was doing business.
